DAVID LEWIS: Election a test of Ramaphosa’s decisive leadership

Bertolt Brecht famously wrote:

After the uprising of the 17th June

The Secretary of the Writers Union

Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee

Stating that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal but probably true, that goes like this: In the early 1980s a young lawyer went to the offices of a leading Johannesburg labour law firm. He met with the partners and told them that he intended setting up a mineworkers’ union, something that not even the already formidable union movement had attempted. After the meeting, the lawyers concluded that this was indeed an unusually thoughtful and courageous young man, but that he had more chance of becoming president of the country than establishing a mineworkers’ union.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. The National Union of Mineworkers was established with a huge impact on SA’s labour scene and political trajectory. Now it seems that the young lawyer was not only courageous, but that he also possessed the strategic nous and flexibility to take on earth-shattering tasks.

The young man then went on to play a leading role in the ANC team that negotiated the post-1994 constitutional dispensation. He was elected secretary-general of the ANC. But then he ran out of political road. “We don’t know this [Cyril] Ramaphosa”, the then powerful, returned exiles muttered when contrary, so it is said, to the instincts of Nelson Mandela, they supported Thabo Mbeki’s elevation to the leadership of the ANC. 

Ramaphosa then went off to the world of business where he accumulated vast wealth. He retained his membership of the ANC’s national executive committee and in 2012 he became deputy president of the ANC. Then in 2014, at the beginning of his second term, Jacob Zuma appointed Ramaphosa national deputy president, succeeding his erstwhile NUM comrade Kgalema Motlanthe.

This surprised political observers. Not only was it widely construed that Ramaphosa had lost his appetite for high political office, but, more than this, the Zuma presidency was already highly compromised by the rampant, naked corruption of the president himself. Few imagined that Ramaphosa would be willing to risk his reputation by entering the Zuma administration.

There followed what, I like to think, must have been the most ethically challenging period of Ramaphosa’s political life. Many people have asked how Ramaphosa sat quietly alongside Zuma, first as his ANC deputy and then as his national deputy, saying nothing while the president and his cronies looted the public purse and destroyed the vital institutions of the country.

Ramaphosa has answered his critics by insisting that he and his allies did indeed constrain Zuma, that everything would have been even worse — for example, our last cent would have been spent on Russian nuclear power stations — had they not strategically and quietly intervened. However, had they publicly taken on Zuma when he was both president of the ANC and the country, he would have won and successfully installed his own successor.

What is clear is that at the first opportunity, the 2017 ANC elective conference, Ramaphosa entered the fray against Zuma’s surrogate candidate, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, whom he defeated in the contest for presidency of the ANC by the narrowest of margins. Within a few months, the newly elected ANC NEC recalled Zuma from the national presidency and installed Ramaphosa in the Union Buildings.

The public celebrated his elevation to the national presidency, inspired by his plea to “Thuma Mina”. He was re-elected national president in 2019 and ANC president in 2021. At the 2019 national election, the ANC retained a substantial but reduced majority of 57%. Then in the 2024 election it lost its majority, its share of the vote falling a huge 17 percentage points to 40%.

But Ramaphosa is not responsible for the ANC’s electoral woes. Surveys and polls confirm that his support from the electorate easily surpasses that of the ANC. However, this has not stopped his many opponents in the ANC from unsheathing their knives, with the ANC’s poor election results given as the reason for removing him from the leadership of the party. 

This will be the first test of whether Ramaphosa can adopt a less conciliatory, more decisive approach to leadership. Take Gauteng, home to the most diverse, sophisticated electorate in the country, where the ANC’s share of the vote fell massively. While it’s clear that the political domination of the province by Paul Mashatile, Ramaphosa’s ambitious deputy, and his “Alex mafia” has brought many public contracts and jobs their way, this has not translated into support for the ANC or the delivery of services to the electorate. Quite the contrary, it has often lost support in the province and service delivery has deteriorated.

In KwaZulu-Natal, the ANC failed, as much for the electorate’s anger at the appalling corruption and mismanagement of the province by the ANC provincial government, as for their support for Zuma. In fact the long-suffering people of KwaZulu-Natal will probably not detect the difference between an ANC provincial government and an MK government.

Accountability for appalling service delivery lies with the leadership of the ANC in these provinces, and resolute ANC leadership would demand that they be held accountable for their dismal failures and state capture scale corruption.

In the medium to long term, the election outcome means that the country will be governed by arrangements between political parties. Indeed, in a proportional representation system, the strong odds are that neither the ANC nor any other political party will ever again achieve a majority vote in the country. But this does not mean that the recent election results should result in a hasty attempt to set up a coalition government. Relations between political parties are characterised by levels of mistrust and disrespect that are unconducive to effective co-operative governance. Moreover it will encourage intense and perpetual bargaining over senior executive positions and the permanent possibility, even likelihood, of a divided executive authority. 

A much more attractive governance option is a “confidence-and-supply” arrangement. This is an arrangement whose typical form would have the largest party with sole responsibility for the executive branch of government. A party or group of parties large enough to constitute, with the largest party, a parliamentary majority, would agree to support the largest party’s nomination for president and also to support it in no-confidence motions and appropriation votes. For its part, the larger party would agree to cede extended oversight over the executive to the smaller parties who partner with it. This would typically take the form of the larger party agreeing to support their smaller partners’ nominations for important parliamentary offices — for example the position of speaker or deputy speaker and chairs of selected parliamentary committees. 

This is a particularly attractive option in a circumstance like SA, where the executive arm has conducted itself with impunity, in part because the parliamentary oversight has been so weak, both arms of government being under the direction of the same party head office. It will strengthen the hand of an executive authority intent upon raising its game and it will raise the stature and power of the legislature.

The only option that is denied to the contending parties is, as Brecht reminds us, the right “to dissolve the people and elect another”.

• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a cofounder and director of Corruption Watch.